


Take A Peek

by RoryKurago



Category: Van Helsing (TV 2016)
Genre: Doc deserves Thank You oral for people alive, F/M, I DON'T EVEN GO HERE, John is kind of an asshole, Voyeurism, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 09:38:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11272842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: “What the hell!”He pushes out a laugh. “Sorry.”“What, you trying to take a peek?!”“No, no, no, no, no, I just—” But he is. He always is.It's her hands, you know. This fucked-up little family are under her hands a lot, their lives collected in her palms like water. One slip and they'll spill.





	Take A Peek

**Author's Note:**

> Don’t look at me, I’m tipsy and watching Van Helsing and there was a little too much staring on John’s part.

He appears at the end of the car just as her head pokes out to see who’s skulking around while she pees. (Four hours in the back of that jury-rigged ambulance, knees knocking, breathing each other’s air – the stinks and smells of being human – more deeply than in the wider confines of the hospital.) Susan and Sam are dancing and laughing. Vanessa and Miller are in cahoots again. John sees Doc slip away out of the corner of his eye. He reckons she’s got the right idea. He’s ready to bust. But—

Her sigh of relief hits him right down low, and right between the lungs. She’s caught up in the bells, and he’s…

He doesn’t step back fast enough.

“What the hell!”

He pushes out a laugh and zips his fly. “Sorry.”

“What, you trying to take a peek?!”

“No, no, no, no, no, I just—”

But he is. He always is.

He looks sidelong at her a lot. Thinks about her a lot. Thinks about _that_ a lot.

“I—I don’t mean to be intrusive,” he blusters. “I wouldn’t do that.”

The side-eye says she knows he’s lying. The set of her mouth says she won’t look too closely at why.

The last night they were together, he and Wendy curled together on a filthy mattress; she reached behind her, cupped the front of his jeans and looked back at him with that Look—that We-Might-Die-Tomorrow stare. ‘ _The others are asleep.’_ And he wouldn’t let her; even though he hardened in her palm, rutted against it despite his better judgement, he told her they should sleep; told her they’d have to run, and to save their energy. Funny how that worked out.

He’s always had, well… a bit of a thing for the precarious. Wendy was his sky-diving instructor. It took six jumps before she’d even give him her number. Not a light commitment for an electrician.

Doc, for her part, represented the steepest ledge he’d ever stood on when he stood in front of that cage Miller kept her in and thought, ‘Well, fuck.’

It wasn’t that he had a hard-on for vamps. He wasn’t that far gone.

It was that Miller was determined to keep her around, and she was the most experienced medical personnel they had—Items One and Two on John’s How Fucked Are We metric. And then she staggered out, human; shaky as a newborn lamb, but human. He’s only surprised that the transition from wanting Doc dead on her back as a fanger to wanting her kneeling above him happened so fast.

With Wendy, it was her energy. With Doc, it’s her competence. It’s her hands. The steadiness of them as she digs into Vanessa’s arm after that tooth; the efficiency as she stitches up that interloper before that. This fucked-up family are under her hands a lot—their lives collected in her palms like water. One slip, and they spill. She is, at once, capable of great wreckage and great salvage. Not quite miracles, but the closest they’ve got since the Apocalypse rolled around.

So he thinks about those hands a lot.

In the hospital, he thought about them as he lay on his gurney, unable to sleep. At the far end of the row, Doc slept on a cot, just visible over the bodies of the others. He learned how to angle himself on the pillow to keep her in sight, watching her through slitted eyes, telling himself it was just so he could keep an eye on the former vampire. He ignored the part of himself saying he didn’t keep an eye on Flesh the same way. That wasn’t relevant.

When she sleeps, she curls her hands up by her mouth. Keeping them warm; keeping them close. That’s wise, John thinks: those hands are worth more than their weight in gold. They’re what’s keeping this troupe alive.

He thinks about those hands on him, and he shivers.

In the ambulance, she sat with her head down, elbows on her knees and hands slack between them. With every jolt in the road, she swayed. Sometimes her fingers brushed his knee where their legs intertwine for lack of space. John looks at the gaps between her fingers and calculates: that’s a space big enough for a scalpel, that for a pen to spin like when she was pacing the infirmary trying to puzzle out the murders. The next bump of the ambulance spreads them wide enough for a lover’s fingers to interlace with hers – a boyfriend’s, no ring tan to say she ever married – and on the next corner, her hand curls like…

He’s not stupid. He knows she’s carrying a torch for Miller. But Miller’s hard-up for Vanessa, and Vanessa’s only thinking about her daughter (and maybe her pretty blond friend), and John knows this kind of fucked-up little merry-go-round didn’t end well even before everything went to Hell in an apple-cart. Shit’s spraying off the fan enough as it is; he’s not going to stir up more.

When Doc looks up to apologise for knocking his knee harder than usual, he avoids her eyes and mumbles something non-committal. It lacks his usual bite, and he knows it. Her nails are filthy but neatly trimmed; there’s a darker patch on the back of the left shaped like Utah.

Susan is looking at John when his eyes slide around for a new focus. Her, John has no trouble staring down. (Except Susan doesn’t bend like normal people do, not after what she’s seen. It’s John who sneers and goes back to looking down at his shoelaces. Doc’s foot between his own is long and slender in scavenged combat boots.)

Those nights in the hospital, the nightmares kept him up, but Doc kept him sane. He starts with her hands—the shape, and size, and texture of them as she turned his face to the side to examine a graze where he slipped in the shower and got too friendly with the wall. Then he moves on to her smile (rare, scalpel-sharp); that pointless, decorative twisting in her sweater-sleeves she spent an hour debating with Susan to perfect; that swagger when she’s getting shit done.

Sometimes there are tangents to his thoughts: is the skin of her cheeks as soft as it looks?

If he kissed her, would she taste metallic?

Do her scars run rough? Would she tell him what she dreams of that makes her twitch and murmur in her sleep? And if he pressed his tongue between her thighs, would he taste the sweat and acridity of desperation to survive or just the sweetest of a woman on a high?

But mostly, he thinks about hands.

Maybe it’s the adrenaline that gets him hard. Maybe it’s how quickly he trusted her with his life. Maybe he’s losing his mind.

Either way, while everyone else is thinking about the bells, and people, and survivors, John’s thinking about hands and how if the world would just give them a moment to take a breather, he’d ask her to put those hands in his hair and show her what he can do.


End file.
